We live overseas and move every couple of years. My daughters get to experience so many cool things, but I always wonder at what cost. I read a study saying that frequent moves put kids at risk for mental health problems — is that true?
––A worried expat mom
The study you’re talking about is here — and you’re not alone in being worried about it. I got a lot of similar messages when it was covered widely in the media.
This paper is a good example of what is possible to do with very large-scale data from Europe. The authors use data on over a million people in Denmark, and they are able to follow their moves during childhood and link that to depression diagnoses later in life. That would be impossible with data from the U.S., but since these European countries have national health systems, the data is more readily accessible and it’s more often possible to link medical conditions to other facts about people.
With such a large dataset, the authors are able to precisely estimate correlations between moving in childhood and depression. However, even a very large and rich dataset cannot directly deliver a causal estimate. Put simply: moving is not random, because there are myriad reasons why someone might move. That doesn’t make a good study.
The basic results in the paper show that moving during childhood increases the risk of depression in adulthood; the increase is large, about a 60% increase for people who moved twice as children and a 40% increase for those who moved once. What the authors cannot see is why the children move, and there are some obvious reasons to think the results might not be because of the move itself.
Notably, a very common reason for moving is parental divorce. We know that parental divorce is associated with later mental health outcomes, and this confound alone could well be driving the results. (This isn’t to be alarmist about divorce; with that, it matters a lot how you handle it). Bottom line: There is a lot of data here, but we’d actually need even more comprehensive data to really know whether the results are meaningful. And there are many reasons to think that why you move matters quite a bit.
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I would like to see a study on military kids and how the regular uprooting impacts them. I have no childhood or high school friends due to moving every 3-4 years (and went to 3 high schools) which has had long term negative impacts for me.
I would say from my own experience alone, the ages you move at and then the frequency of those moves is going to make a big difference. My guess is moving at younger ages and only one or twice would have minimal impact (assuming the family is in tact).